The Last Whaling Master

He was the son of a Vineyarder who earned a small fortune in the California gold mines,
a farm boy who sailed the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic oceans in pursuit of the bowhead whale, and yet he died less than a mile from the Middle Road farmhouse in which he was born. The story of Ellsworth Luce West of Chilmark comes late in the two-hundred-and-fifty-year epoch of American whaling, but it does not depart in significant thematic ways from those of hundreds of Island whaling masters who went before him.

Before he turned thirty, Captain West – shown here with his bride Gertrude Eager of West Newton in 1892 – had seen the headlands and ports of Newfoundland, the Azores, and the western coastline of America from Cape Horn up over the top of Alaska. He had seen Hawaii, Guam, the Galapagos, the Marshalls, uncounted islands in Micronesia, as well as Japan, most of the Aleutians, and Siberia. He knew San Francisco better than he knew Boston, Nome better than Edgartown.

He harpooned his first whale at the age of eighteen, spent his first four-year voyage to the Pacific living with five other men and boys in a cabin twelve feet by six, and learned the trick of using cockroaches to eat the nits that lived in his bedsheets.

He was wrongly accused of murder at twenty-two (the alleged victim, a deckhand on the vessel in which West was serving as second mate, actually jumped from the mast into the night, a suicide). He spent ten minutes lying on an upturned whaleboat in the Arctic Ocean in a snow squall, thrusting his head and arms below the surface to try to cut loose a wounded bowhead that was rapidly sounding and threatening to pull the boat and the men down through the ice. His crew was rescued, their legs frozen beyond numbness, and taken to their ship, the bark California. There West was given a shot of Jamaica ginger and a rubdown, after which he returned, unbidden, to the bridge to supervise the collection of his wrecked boat. On vacation during one winter in the Arctic – many whalers made it a practice to stay there after the autumn hunt so as to get the earliest possible start again in the spring – he drew a team of huskies and two natives from the crew and drove eighty miles inland to visit Eskimo settlements in the mountains and buy seven hundred and fifty pounds of caribou meat for the crew. The temperature at night routinely fell to forty degrees below zero.

His wife Gertrude, a teacher at the Menemsha School whom he met on a trip home after the death of his mother in 1890, shared his spirit of adventure. She sailed with him as ship’s clerk on every voyage on which he was in command. The captain and his wife were carried ashore in their dory by natives in the Marshalls, traded with tribal kings in the Carolines, and weathered the Arctic winter together, where the men of a dozen ships and more would walk over the ice for socials that included songs, dances, and even plays written and produced by the crews. When Captain West lost his ship Horatio on a reef at the narrow entrance to the harbor at Kusaie, Micronesia, in 1899, Mrs. West was put ashore in the first boat to leave the vessel. Her small upright piano was the last thing taken from the Horatio – lifted out of the wreck at three in the morning by the crew and brought ashore in a whaleboat.

The loss of the Horatio marked the end of Captain West’s whaling career. Gertrude West went home to mind the family farm in Chilmark. Husband and wife – who had kept a pledge to read the same chapter of the Bible each night during the year they were affianced but separated during his fourth whaling voyage – now spent the longest period of their marriage apart; the captain remained on the West Coast for most of every year between 1900 and 1910, ferrying passengers, freight, and mail from San Francisco and Seattle up to the gold rush encampments in and around Nome. His vessel, the former revenue cutter Corwin, was the first ship to make it through the ice to Nome for eight consecutive springtimes.

He gave up the trade when he saw the gold rush tapping out, returning to Chilmark and a new farm he bought in the heart of town. Gertrude died in 1917 following a long illness. After the war, Ellsworth married Elsie Athearn Crowell, an Islander who had looked after his wife during her decline. In his fifties, he began fathering children at an admirable rate, having six in all. “The farm and all that goes with it is quite a step down from being master of a ship,” West told a reporter from the Vineyard Gazette in 1926, as four of his boys and girls clambered over his lap. “But this is my job now, to teach these little fellows to be good citizens that their country may be proud of.” He died April 10, 1949, having just finished dictating his memoirs to Eleanor Ransom Mayhew. This autobiography was published under the title of Captain’s Papers in 1965. Ellsworth Luce West was the last of the Vineyard whaling masters.